Tag Archives: mythology

When I’m staring off into space my wife never asks, “Whatcha thinking about honey?” because I’m often thinking about things that are…shall we say…not so conventional.

Like what Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is really about.

If you’re interested in the mythological underpinnings of this Disney epic — which go all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia! — give me a half hour of your time and I just might blow your mind.

If this sort of thing interests you, you might enjoy this post as well.

And finally, if you’re a feminist who hates Sleeping Beauty on the grounds that it dis-empowers women, I strenuously disagree and I’d love for you to watch my video and share your thoughts. The movie really is, in my estimation, a “pro-choice” movie about the essential role that women have played and continue to play in the evolution and renewal of our culture.

Like this:

I find it refreshing and downright beautiful that two very different writers — an American poet writing in English about the origin of culture and an Estonian-Russian mystic writing in French about Christian Hermeticism — could express (from very different perspectives of course) the same essential truth in very similar language. Both of these books are excellent by the way — highly recommended.

“Because we have separated humanity from nature, subject from object, values from analysis, knowledge from myth, and universities from the universe, it is enormously difficult for anyone but a poet or a mystic to understand what is going on in the holistic and mythopoetic thought of Ice Age humanity. The very language we use to discuss the past speaks of tools, hunters, and men, when every statue and painting we discover cries out to us that this Ice Age humanity was a culture of art, the love of animals, and women…We have to use the “Imagination” to recover a sense of the sacred. The sacred is the emotional force which connects the part to the whole; the profane or the secular is that which as broken off from, or has fallen off, its emotional bond to the universe.“

“[I]ntelligence with conscience eclipsed…is the Arcanum of the magical mechanism, working behind the surface of the state of intelligence, which aims at explaining movement by the immobile, life by the non-living, consciousness by the unconscious, morality by the amoral. Indeed, how has it happened to mankind that many of its intelligent representatives — even its leaders and directors — have come to see in the brain not the instrument but the producer of consciousness, in chemistry not the instrument but the producer of life, in the economic sphere not the instrument but the producer of culture? How can it be that human intelligence has arrived — in so far as many of its representatives are concerned — at seeing man without a soul and the world without God?”